Those Who Hunt Monsters

Last night, I beat Assassin’s Creed 2 and it coincided with one of the most vivid and memorable dreams I’ve had in some time. In my dream, I was a teenaged, unaffiliated monster hunter who was working undercover at a boy’s summer camp to take down a particularly nasty creature that plucked boys from the lodge one-by-one.

Partway through the dream, there was a cutaway to another unaffiliated monster hunter having a confrontation with a religious monster hunter in a monastery. It was intense because I followed both of them, and while at cross-purposes the two were ultimately on the same side. Thankfully, it ended with neither dead or injured.

Back at the summer camp, I consoled the boys who were being terrified and taunted by the creature during a “slumber party” even without adults, and the monster entered the lodge and it turned out the creature could only take boys who willingly joined it – it had a strange charming or luring effect. I helped the boys fight its influence.

Of course, not all of the boys were as strong-willed as the others, and a couple of them broke under the pressure. The last thing I remember was bolting from a table to grab one of the boys and throw him to cover when the creature attacked me, either grabbing or stabbing me, I’m not sure. The rest of the dream played out oddly.

The correlation between my dream and Assassin’s Creed 2 would appear to come from the “who hunts monsters” context. In Dungeons & Dragons, it’s very clear who the villains are when you have elves and halflings on one side, and orcs and goblins on the other. AC2 blurs the line ever so slightly, but the line is still there.

In my own D&D games of late, I’ve been trying to move farther and farther from using “obvious” monsters. I don’t want to play the game where the enemies are necessarily the same cackling fiends as they are on the cover of the books, but rather a handful of unscrupulous humans with a goal they seek that they think justifies their actions.

I’ll admit, it isn’t a game for everyone. Trying to base decisions on observations that are more than skin deep is really a challenge in a game that gives you the fireball spell to throw around. But that same fireball in the hands of a madman is a terrifying prospect, Wizards being the persons of mass destruction that they are.